THE WILL OF WAR COMPELLED ME TO LEAVE SARAJEVO

Here we bring you the personal account of the exciting life’s journey of one of the top contemporary writers from the area of the former Yugoslavia. What was he made beholden to by his ancestors, or by his parents and extended family? How did the war split his life into two completely different parts? Why do he and his wife Ana Bogišić live in a village near Zagreb, and why does he visit Belgrade more often than to his native Sarajevo? How does he view Ivo Andrić and what are the common characteristics of Andrić’s world and his?

He attended the same Sarajevo gymasium high school as two of the most famous natives of Bosnia: revolutionary member of the Young Bosnia movement Gavrilo Princip and Nobel-prize winning author Ivo Andrić. He went on to graduate in philosophy and sociology, prior to which he’d already started writing. Bornin 1966, Miljenko Jergović was a Yugoslav before the wars of the ’90s, while today he is known as a Bosnia-Herzegovinian and Croatian writer. An even more amusing illustration of the times that we lived through is the fact that his wife enrolled to study Yugoslav literature in Zagreb and Yugoslavia disintegrated while she was still studying, which meant that she ended up graduating in Croatian literature. An editor and proofreader by profession, Ana is the only proofreader and editor of Miljenko’s books.

“That’s a very important and fundamentally delicate matter. It was extremely difficult before her, just as it would be very difficult with someone else today, because I would have to explain too many things to those people. I reached my wits’ end explaining to people that the language in which I write does not appear in Croatian dictionaries. That’s my language; I have the right to my own language. Ana is my protector against the terror of standardised dictionaries and standardised grammar.”

He was just over 20 when he wrote the poetry collection The Warsaw Observatory [Opservatorija Varšava], for which he received the Ivan Goran Kovačić Award, Yugoslavia’s top award for poetry. He has since written around 50 books in various genres, which have been translated into 20-odd languages. These works are partly fiction and partly autobiographical, and for 1994’s Sarajevo Marlboro collection of stories he received the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize. Representing Jergović’s personal testimony to life in wartorn Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is still discussed to this day. Thanks to the persuasive argument of his translator to Polish, but also his own desire to see how Sarajevo Marlboro, which he wrote when he was 27, would look when written by a man of 54, he penned the book Three for Kartal [Trojica za Kartal], with the subtitle Sarajevo Marlboro Remastered. Inspired by the stories from the book that made him famous, Three for Kartal was published by Booka in Belgrade last year.

He lived in his native Sarajevo until 1993, when he moved to Zagreb. Nowadays he spends his winters in the Croatian capital, spending the rest of the year living in the Turopolje region, around 20 kilometres from Zagreb. Together with his wife Ana, he visits Belgrade relatively regularly to relax and see friends. This time around, when we used the opportunity to record this interview for CorD Magazine, he had come to the Serbian capital to attend the premiere of The Idiot, under the production of director Ivica Buljan, at the Belgrade Drama Theatre.

There are numerous books in which Jergović discusses his family. His long-divorced parents, but also his close relatives on both his father’s and mother’s sides. And when asked how he

By Radmila Stanković

would describe the upbringing he received at home, or what is referred to as home education, this writer answers:

“I’m actually the child of my Nono and Nona, or my maternal grandparents. So, I have no experience of home education from my parents. When I recall them today, it is both completely unimaginable and terrifying that they could have brought me up, because who knows what would have come of that and how that would have looked. I am really a child of my previous ancestors, or my grandparents. In that sense, the world of my upbringing and maturing process also somewhat reflects a kind of previous civic world. I suppose I was brought up in the way kids had been raised in the 1930s. In a way I thus belong to the generation of Bora Ćosić. [writer Bora Ćosić turns 91 on 5th April this year]. And I don’t say this by accident. That’s because when I read his book My Family’s Role in the World Revolution, I somehow actually see the world of my own home in the most intimate possible sense. And that isn’t really normal, given that he was raised 35 years before me.”

Miljenko’s grandfather Nono was actually called Franjo Rejc. He lived as a Bosnian, but had Slovenian origins and self-identified as an ardent Slovene. Grandma Nona, Olga Rejc, was the daughter of an ethnic German from